On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Web Applications Working Group Issue
Tracker <sysbot+tracker@w3.org> wrote:
> 'mousewheel' was later dropped based on feedback from implementers (Mozilla, Microsoft), who expressed a reluctance to implement 'mousewheel', and a lack of useful interoperability and concern that any change to improve interop would likely break a number of sites.
>
> However, the group may wish to consider adding it again, see:
> * http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-dom/2010JulSep/0103.html
I'm generally concerned about events which don't work well in other media.
One of the challenges we faced while developing the n900 was dealing
with web sites which expected a fully functional two button mouse (the
n900 is a touch screen with no buttons). We've had designs at time
which provide for showing a mouse on part of the screen and enabling a
user to tap on the left/right buttons etc., this is painful,
expensive, awkward, and I don't have any studies showing users manage
to make this work. Having to deal w/ the scroll wheel case makes this
worse. Otoh, it /might/ be ok to specify "onzoom" and "onscroll", most
devices have /some/ support for these operations (in the n900 we have
hardware volume keys which are sometimes used for zooming, and the
user can user their finger or stylus to trigger a scroll operation).
The same general behaviors could exist in e.g. the iPod
Touch/iPhone/iPad -- none of which have a scroll wheel.
Sorry for the lateness of my reply, I was on vacation last month and
now have 100+ conversations in this group to catch up on (this
includes not being able to respond to messages between "LC
Announcement" and "LC Deadline").